Minneapolis -- After kicking around the fringes of the major leagues for six years, during which his wife, Crystal, worked as a longshoreman to help support the family, Jesse Chavez finally has a home in a starting rotation.

Finding such a spot at the age of 30 is most unusual, but there's not much in the way of routine when it comes to Chavez, who will start Wednesday's game at Minnesota.

First of all, he is among the lightest professional athletes around, non-jockey division: He's 6-foot-2 and is optimistically listed at 160 pounds. When he was in high school, he was 6-0 and weighed 125.

"We had him in the weight room, but you can't add much strength when there are no muscles," said Robert Ridge, Chavez's pitching coach at A.B. Miller High School in Fontana (San Bernardino County). "Jesse is just all skin and bones. It's laughable what some teams have listed his weight as; some places put him at 175. There's no way."

When Chavez was in the Rangers' organization, he even had a live-in trainer and nutritionist, and he put on 20 pounds one offseason, only to lose it all during spring training.

In 2006, Texas sent Chavez to Pittsburgh, the first of five times he's been traded. In 2009, the Pirates dealt him to the Rays just as Crystal was going into labor with their younger daughter.

"While she was having contractions, I was on the phone, getting blindsided," Chavez said. "That started the whole spiral." A few weeks later, he was traded again, to Atlanta.

Fuson always kept tabs on Chavez as he bounced around, and he mentioned to the A's front office a few years ago that he thought Chavez would make a good starter.

"I kept throwing Jesse's name out there, because he was on the waiver wire every three or four weeks," Fuson said. "He'd always been behind the eight ball since leaving Texas, trying to find his way."

The A's obtained Chavez from Toronto late in the 2012 season, and he was dreadful, allowing nine hits and seven runs in 3 1/3 innings.

Oakland stuck with him, though, believing that his 95-mph fastball and good changeup would make him effective once he got comfortable. Last year, Chavez proved his worth, doing stellar work in long relief. Then he was the A's best pitcher this spring and would have had a shot at a rotation spot even if Jarrod Parker and A.J. Griffin had not gone down with injuries in March.

In the past two decades, Colby Lewis of the Rangers and Jeff Fassero of the Expos are among the few who have migrated from relief work to the rotation in their 30s, and Lewis had one season as a big-league starter already on his resume from his early 20s.

This is the first year Chavez has started the season with a solid big-league job. The uncertainty in other years was one reason Crystal Chavez, 30, kept working night shifts as a longshoreman at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports. She drives tractors to unload ships, and has no plans to quit, even with Chavez more firmly established.

"I kind of get caught up in going to work," said Crystal, who has been on the job for more than nine years. "It's like baseball - it's not just a job, you're working with different people, it's outside. I will never give it up."

After putting in all those hours, she now has a more forgiving schedule that will allow her and daughters Christe, 10, and Stevee, 4, to travel with the A's more often this year. Still, Jesse Chavez worries about his wife when she does work, particularly after one of her colleagues was killed in a freak accident two years ago. "It's dangerous, to say the least," he said.

The Chavezes met at Miller High, where Jesse was a star pitcher. But because Chavez was a pitcher and pitcher only, Ridge also had him climb on the gigantic riding mower to cut the grass during batting practice, with a teammate sticking near him to shag baseballs and protect him.

"We had the best field ever," Chavez said.

"What we loved is that he never once complained about that or said, 'I should be swinging the bat,' " Ridge said. "He just eats baseball up, it doesn't matter what it is, even if it's mowing the grass."

Chavez was involved in one of the great all-time high school pitching matchups, a famed Southern California contest against league-rival Rialto High and longtime friend Ricky Nolasco, now with the Twins. Both threw 10 shutout innings in a game Miller won 1-0 after the starters had to come out because of innings limits.

Chavez threw about 150 pitches; Nolasco, incredibly, 188.

"Neither one of us was going to come out unless we had to," Chavez said. "Everything was clicking for both of us."

"It was a lot of fun because we were kids, but we'd played against each other for a long time," Nolasco said. "So it was always obvious to me that Jesse is a starter - and I was shocked that in the big leagues, he's been a reliever.

"It's awesome he's got a legit chance to start with Oakland, I'm so happy. Better late than never."

That's the general feeling for all who know Chavez.

"Jesse used to get bypassed a lot. One inning would go south, and teams would give up on him," Crystal Chavez said. "The A's, they've never given up on him. Everything is finally paying off."